WHY I AM A MISOGYNIST, IN PART

Please don't get mad at me, Mom

Photo by Avi Waxman on Unsplash

Once a week or so, my wife’s voice sails from her perch in the living room, turns a corner, and meets me at the kitchen sink where I’m cooking, washing dishes, or loading the dishwasher.  My eyes narrow and my shoulders rise. I’m being called to from another room, and while I love Annie with all my heart, this behavior of hers cannot be tolerated.

Quite unfairly, I have never in our seven years together announced that this is a rule I live by: Under no circumstances is it appropriate to call someone from another room. It’s a stupid rule, and better that I keep it to myself. But I get to have it both ways, and resent the charmless implication that whatever Annie wants is quite obviously more important to her than whatever petty, selfish task I am engaged in.

Life would be much easier were it not for interruptions. Especially when mom is involved, I mean Annie, I mean any woman whatsoever. Um, perhaps there is a wee bit of confusion there.

I am not blessing this hoary story, or relieving my shame for repeating it in my life, daily. But please follow along anyway, even suspiciously: I think there’s something here that relates to the general misogyny that plagues our culture. Women may have the trope that men are fickle and abandon, but men have the trope that women interrupt and nag, and it’s worth examining if it’s worth shaming.

My quotidian work, free from interruptions by the way, is to sit with clients one-on-one and interrogate their relationship with the voice inside that is known as the inner critic. My client conjures up their own personal belittler, and examines its words, its underlying principles, and its humanoid characteristics. Its words are commands and insults by and large, its principles are elementary morals fit for a six-year-old, and its characteristics are, well, often, exactly those of a nagging mom: stern, superior, weary, and disappointed. In fact, 80 percent of my clients and workshop attendees – men and women – hear the inflections of their own mother in their inner critic’s voice. Think about that a moment.

This matricentric inner critic voice makes sense since both traditionally and in action to this day, mothers typically spend more time than fathers in the daily activity of restraining kids . Moms spend more time teaching and reminding the kid of the rules – often repetitively, which gets labeled nagging – than fathers do. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just reporting the facts, ma’am. Traditionally, moms are teachers and nags, fathers coaches and disciplinarians. This still goes on much more than people want to admit.

My mother had her rules, and in some ways she was strict. But she was also pleased to have imaginative, playful children. The problem was that she was overwhelmed. Hers was that first generation of families picking up roots and moving away from family and friends, in our case from California to D.C. She had no support system when she arrived, and the frantically busy post-war world was dawdling in its duty to find substitutes for aunts and grandmothers and next-door neighbors as mothers found themselves isolated in strange-to-them communities. My mother was alone, and presumably petrified.

All we knew as kids, though, was that wherever we were in the house, when our formal names were called, we were to abandon whatever we were playing or reading, rush to her side, stand in anticipation, and receive instructions for our next duty. Of course, that’s not too much to expect. But tell a kid engrossed in play that it’s time to take out the trash, or eat dinner, or do your homework, or get dressed, or mind your frenetic little brother, and you might have dropped an atomic bomb on all their hopes and dreams. Kids live in the present, and an interrupted present is dooming. Plus, mom was often grumpy. Hers wasn’t an ideal life of bon bons and cigarettes, perhaps.

I know my brothers agreed with me back then, even if you don’t, that the nagging mother deserved to be resented. We commiserated when one of us was barked at for being recalcitrant in our chores or, for God’s sake, having ignored mom’s first two beckonings. Occasionally things got a smidgen out of control, and our punishment didn’t seem fit to the crime. No, I can say with authority that nothing good followed my name being called out from another room, whether I obeyed or malingered.

At around six years old I acquired my inner critic. This happens to every civilized human being, whether born in Senegal, India, or the United States of America. A voice shows up that allows me to slip the leash of my parents and cross a busy street; it reminds me to look both ways. Because its main duty is to keep me from being creamed by a car or whisked away by a stranger with a bag of candy, it operates strictly out of negative reinforcement. Meaning it sounds like an annoyed, possibly angry parent. We won’t go into it here, but this bullying, nagging voice of authority sticks around long after we’ve learned the basic rules, and continues its scolding ways through a lifetime, if we don’t pay attention. Most people go to their deathbed still in its presence, holding a sincere belief that that voice is their conscience, their motivator, and an unpleasant but built-in requirement of being human.

Which means that most people die with the belief that something that resembles a nagging mother has dogged them relentlessly through decades of potential and real disappointments, making them feel little – a six-year-old listening to an adult – and ashamed.

Let’s take a break from this dreary picture and talk some about projection, transference, and object relations. Projection says that we’re all narcissists with a particular point of view that we impose onto other people. So instead of seeing another person for whom they think they are, we see what we want to see in them. Since everybody’s doing this, most of everyday conversation involves a projection talking to a projection. Somehow the trains run on time anyway, so this burying of reality is considered normal and fine. Transference you might have read about in a psychology text, where it shows up as the substitution of your therapist for your absent parent. In your mind, after getting to know your therapist, you start to treat them as a parent, seeking approval or imbuing them with a mom-or-dad-like authority over your life. What the therapists seldom point out is that transference applies to all adults you meet, not just the ones paid to listen. Mostly it happens at the gender level. When you first meet anyone who presents as a woman, you seek her attention and approval the same way you did your own mother or female caretaker. Likewise every adult who presents as a man gets treated more than a little bit like a father figure, at least at first. These early patterns getting replicated through life are the centerpiece of object relations theory, a sector of psychology’s standard model, which says it takes conscious work to quit imposing your parents on later-in-life adults. Needless to say, most of our fellow citizenry never does that work.

Now what happens when we mix the inner critic – a facsimile of a frowning parent – with transference – the strange tendency to superimpose my parents on random adults, friends, and, um, loved ones?

Bingo. Every woman might seem to have a dash of nagging mom present, and every man might seem to threaten you with discipline.

Fortunately, there’s no reason to think that these misidentifications are biological necessities, or cultural imperatives. They’re just the hangover of childhood lessons, and the culture hasn’t bothered to counter them because it happens that citizens who believe that they are needy children make good workers. The species prefers to employ obedient laborers willing to do what they’re told. It’s an ersatz-child labor market.

Unfortunately, no one shows up for our seventeen-year-old selves to congratulate us that we’re mature enough to give the inner critic the old heave-ho. Its lessons were appropriate for a six-to-twelve-year-old, and at seventeen you have learned right from wrong perfectly well, and it’s integrated into you. You don’t need to be talked to like you are still six. You know the rules, even if you break them, and you learn from your mistakes. But no seventeen-year-old is offered this wisdom, or gets the chance to pronounce to their inner critic, “I can tell myself to look both ways, thank you. ‘Bye Mom or Dad or whatever authority figure you represent. I’m good. I’m an adult.”

Likewise no one tells you at seventeen that you’re perfectly good at standing on your own two feet now in the presence of real authority, and you don’t need to turn strangers and bosses and professors and friends into father figures or mother figures. The lessons that guarantee you the necessities of food, shelter, and clothing have been implanted, even if the authorities behind those lessons – your dear parents – are no longer on the scene 24/7. (In our politics even, we mistake the personality of authority for the policies of authority. I daresay most people nowadays pick a president on the candidates’ parental authority characteristics, instead of ignoring their attitudes and focusing on their spoken policies and deliverables.)

We think it’s funny when we notice that some men marry their mothers and some women marry their fathers.

It’s a lot less funny that most men are carrying around an image of a nagging, belittling mother day after day, week after week, year after year, as their inner critic bullies away. (Women aren’t immune to the trope of the nagging mother, but such a high percentage become mothers themselves that maybe on the whole women can see through the misidentification. They can think, “Oh, that wasn’t my mother nagging me. That was her teaching me the ropes. It’s hard.”  Or it’s simpler: Women have dramatically higher emotional intelligence than men. On the other hand, at least half of my women clients still spend a considerable amount of time at odds with their aging mothers.)

Would a passel of men stuck with an image of a nagging mom berating them daily, and another image of said mom being mistaken for every woman in their life maybe lean toward misogyny?

Ninety-nine+ percent of the time Annie is Annie, the brilliant, beautiful, precious being I get to share my life with. Maybe the <1 percent of the time she’s my nagging mom – either my inner critic or an image of my actual mom – and I resent her, I could notice the mistaken identity and work on it. But in the meantime, I can live with a little mental grumbling when I hear my name called out from another room. At least she has never yelled, “Neal French Allen! I know you’re there!” I’ll let you know if it comes to that.